Clinton helps dedicate FDR park

Dignitaries on Wednesday dedicated a new memorial state park overlooking the United Nations to former President Franklin Roosevelt.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, on an island in New York City’s East River, “will stand forever as a monument to the man who brought us through the Great Depression and brought us victory over great evil,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg told several hundred people at the dedication ceremony, celebrating a design 40 years in the making.

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Former President Bill Clinton said Roosevelt’s dream for a better world “is still the right dream for America,” and the park should remind the nation his lofty goals are worth pursuing.

The triangular park is named after Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address, known as the Four Freedoms speech, given before America got involved in World War II. Roosevelt said the way to justify the enormous sacrifice of war was to create a world centered on four essential human freedoms: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. The words were later incorporated into the charter of the United Nations.

The park sits on Roosevelt Island, a 2-mile slice of land between Manhattan and Queens. The 4-acre expanse of green is flanked by 120 trees leading to a colossal bronze bust of Roosevelt at the threshold of a white granite open-air plaza.

The statue is an enlargement of a 28-inch bust of Roosevelt, also a New York governor, created by American sculptor Jo Davidson. It sits in a stone niche on the back of which a passage from the Four Freedoms speech is carved. The statue sits a mere 300 yards across the river from the headquarters of the United Nations, which Roosevelt helped found.

The park will open to the public Oct. 24.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. William vanden Heuvel, chairman of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park , said, “We hope visitors of different ages will understand that the four freedoms are the core values of democracy and that each generation has to be sure to protect them.”